Climate-Smart infrastructure

In my home state of California in the United States, major drought-fueled wildfires tore across the state in the latter half of 2017 setting records for both the state’s deadliest fire, as well as the largest fire. Wildfire season is back in 2018 with the most destructive year ever—currently more than 13,000 firefighters are battling 9 large blazes that have damaged or destroyed over 2,000 homes or buildings and scorched over 730,000 acres of land.

The Mendocino Complex fire in Northern California recently broke the state’s previous record for largest fire, spreading furiously due to heat, wind, and years of drought.

California’s Governor Jerry Brown said this is becoming the new normal…where fires threaten people’s lives, property, neighborhoods and, of course, billions and billions of dollars. Many point to climate change as the driver for weather conditions fueling most of the wildfires. July was the hottest on record for the state, and extreme weather is causing larger and more destructive fires across the whole western United States.

Over the last few decades, Public-Private-Partnerships (PPPs) have been used to build transportation, energy, telecommunications, and other infrastructure throughout the world. Value chains were established to foster growth in these sectors and significant experiences gained. A sector largely overlooked for PPP investments is the tourism sector.

In 2016, travel and tourism generated $7.6 trillion (10.2 percent of global gross domestic product) and an estimated 292 million jobs globally. The tourism sector is also the largest market-based contributor to finance protected areas such as national parks. In some countries, tourism depends almost exclusively on natural systems, often with wildlife as the primary attraction.

In developed countries, we tend to take infrastructure services for granted. It’s easy to forget, when living in London, Washington, or Singapore, how much lies behind the simple act of switching on the lights. But as a young person growing up in India in the 1960s, I knew what it was like to live with rampant electricity shortages and terrible roads. It was easy to complain about it, and we did. It seemed, then, that the solution was simple: government should simply cough up the money, get to work, and build the infrastructure.